Oracle OpenWorld Day 4 Highlights September 24, 2010

Thankfully after a decent night’s sleep, I approached Day 4 at Oracle OpenWorld with more energy than I did yesterday.

I probably had the most productive morning of the whole conference when I visited the various Oracle product booths in the Exhibition Hall at Moscone South and spoke to many of the database product managers and development staff. I had a good chat with folks from RAC One, the CBO, Database Replay and Oracle Total Recall teams among others and was able to discuss various issues with these technologies and future directions and enhancements. As an example, I was able to get useful information on how existing journal records might be added to flashback archive enabled tables and how it might potentially be possible to remove or alter exisiting flashback data, issues that we need to have addressed before we could consider implementing Total Recall capabilities. I would strongly recommend anyone coming to OpenWorld spend some time and talk to these guys and get direct answers to questions you might have with various current Oracle technologies.

After another pleasant lunch in the sun, listening to live music, I sat in on the SQL Tuning Roundtable session. Unfortunately, it was all a bit of a flop really, with most of the time spent wading through overheads on various new Oracle 11g features rather than spend the time allowing people to ask and get their questions answered. I think only one or two of the questions written on the cards before the session started were actually answered by the panel during the session. Tip to the organisers of these types of sessions, devote all the available time for allowing folks to have questions answered and leave the presentation of new features for another time.

I next walked across to that other major event being held in San Francisco at the moment, Oracle Closed World. It was great to catch up with Mogens Norgaard and a host of other fellow OakTable members and listen in to Kevin Closson give another excellent and informative Q&A session, with the audience drinking free beer. There is something about free beer that just makes it taste just that little bit better :) Afterwards, caught up over a beer with Kevin, Tanel Poder, Kyle Hailey, Kerry Osborne, Tim Hall to name but a few and met James Morle for the first time which was great. Thanks to Mogens and Kyle for organising everything.

Many of us then made our way to the great blogger get-together as organised by Alex Gorbachev and the folks at Pythian. As we did last year, we were given t-shirts and then meant to get as many people to have them signed as possible. However, I wanted to keep my t-shirt graffiti free as they’ll make a great t-shirt but made the unfortunate mistake of wearing a white t-shirt to the event. As such, I spent much of my time dodging people who kept trying to write on my t-shirt. Fortunately, I managed to make it out without graffiti free. A big thanks to Alex, Pythian, OTN and the other sponsors and organisers of a great event as I had the great pleasure of meeting a host of great fellow bloggers for the first time.

Finally, it was time for the Appreciation Event and my date with the Black Eye Peas. First though, we had to wait patiently for the coach in a massive queue that wrapped around nearly 2 full blocks. This year’s OOW event is sooooo much bigger than recent previous years. It actually went surprisingly quickly and we were on our way, with the truly spectacular lights of San Francisco passing by as we crossed the bridge to Treasure Island. This year, the place was totally and completely packed with people with huge queues for access to the food. Unfortunately, the food was really disappointing and nowhere near as good as its been previously but there was plenty of beer and wine on hand to make amends.

I’m not a great fan of the Black Eyes Peas to be honest and heard they’re not the best live band but my daughter is a fan so I decided to watch them and take a few photos. They’re started out a bit slowly but they so warmed up and by the end I thought they were actually very good and had put on a great show. There is something about a huge bass vibrating through your whole body, a light show and lasers that makes arena rock what it is. In the end, I had a great night but was thankful the queues to get back on the buses were no where as long.